THE GIFT OF FIRE

by Richard Mitchell

Chapter One
Who is Socrates,
Now That We Need Him?

WHEN BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN was hardly more than a boy, but clearly a comer, he decided
to achieve moral perfection. As guides in this enterprise, he chose
Jesus and Socrates.
One of his self-assigned
rules for daily behavior was nothing more than this: "Imitate
Jesus and Socrates."

I suspect that few would disagree. Even
most militant atheists admire Jesus, while assuming, of course, that
they admire him for the right reasons. Even those who have no
philosophy and want none admire Socrates, although exactly why, they
can not say. And very few, I think, would tell the young Franklin that
he ought to have made some different choices: Alexander, for instance,
or Francis Bacon.

Jesus, just now, has no shortage of would-be
imitators, although they do seem to disagree among themselves as to
how he ought to be imitated. But the imitators of Socrates, if any there
be, are hard to find. For one thing, if they are more or less accurately
imitating him, they will not organize themselves into Socrates clubs
and pronounce their views. If we want to talk with them, we will have
to seek them out; and, unless we ourselves become, to some degree at
least, imitators of Socrates, we will not know enough to want to seek
them out. Indeed, unless we are sufficiently his imitators, we might
only know enough not to want to seek him out, for some of those
who sought Socrates out found reason to wish that they hadn't. Unlike
Jesus, or, to be more accurate, unlike the Jesus whom many imagine,
Socrates often brought not the Good News, but the Bad.

Nevertheless, people do from time to time
come to know enough about Socrates to be drawn into his company, and
to agree, with rare exceptions, that it would indeed be a good thing
to imitate him. The stern poet-philosopher Nietzsche
was one of those exceptions, for he believed, and quite correctly, that
reasonable discourse was the weapon with which the weak might defeat
the strong, but most of us often do think of ourselves as weak rather
than strong, and what seemed a bad thing to Nietzsche seems a good thing
to us. However, when we do try to imitate Socrates, we discover
that it isn't as easy, and as readily possible to millions, as the imitation
of Jesus is said to be.

So we make this interesting distinction:
We decide that the imitation of Jesus lies in one Realm, and the imitation
of Socrates in quite another, The name of the first, we can not easily
say, but the name of the second is pretty obviously "mind."
Even the most ardent imitators of Jesus seldom think of themselves as
imitating the work of his mind, but of, well, something else, the spirit,
perhaps, or the feelings, or some other faculty hard to name. But those
who would imitate Socrates know that they must do some work in the mind,
in the understanding, in the intellect, perhaps even in the formidable
"intelligence" of the educational psychologists, beyond whose
boundaries we can no more go than we can teach ourselves to jump tall
buildings. We may apparently follow Jesus simply by feeling one thing
rather than another, but the yoke of Socrates is not easy, and his burden
not light, nor does he suffer little children to come unto him.

And we say that, while it would be truly
splendid to imitate his example, it really can't be done as a general
rule for ordinary life. Very few of us are as smart as Socrates, after
all, and the smartest of us are already very busy in computers and astrophysics.
Socrates appeared once and only once among us, and the chances of his
coming again are very slim. We may hold him up as a shining example,
of course, but as a distant star, not a candle in the window of home.
He is one in billions. So we must, it seems, resign ourselves to living
not the examined life but the unexamined life, responding to the suggestions
of environment and the inescapable power of genetic endowment and toilet
training.

Nevertheless, millions and millions of
us contemplate no serious difficulty at all in imitating the example
of Jesus, who, as it happens, is also held to be one in billions. We
do not say, Ah well, a Jesus comes but once among us, and we
lesser folk must content ourselves with remembering, once in a while,
some word or deed of his, and trying, although without any hope of truly
and fully succeeding, to speak as he might have spoken, to think as
he might have thought, and to do as he might have done. Sometimes, to
be sure, provided that we do in fact understand him correctly, which
is by no means always certain, we might come near the mark. But it is
childish and idealistic to imagine that we can, especially in this busiest
and most technically demanding of worlds, plainly and simply live as
Jesus lived. No, we do not make those reservations, but suppose rather
that, in the case of this one life among billions, we can launch
ourselves, all at once, and as if by magic, into the Way in which he
walked. And this is because we imagine that the Way of Socrates is barricaded
by the wall of an intelligence test, and the Way of Jesus is not, that
the regularly examined life requires a lot of hard mental labor, and
that the good life is as natural and automatic as the singing of the
birds.

But there was at least one man who held,
and who seems to have demonstrated in a very convincing fashion, that
Socrates was not at all special, that he was, indeed, just as ignorant
as the rest of us. We can not dismiss him as a political enemy or an
envious detractor, or even as a more "advanced" philosopher
who had the advantage of modern information to which Socrates had no
access. It was Socrates himself who made that demonstration. And, although
Plato is surely the most humorous and ironic of philosophers, it is
just not possible to read Socrates' Apology
as a witty trick at the jury's expense. It is a sober autobiography.
Socrates explains that he has simply spent his life in trying to discover
what the god could have meant in saying, by an astonishing oracle, that
Socrates of Athens was the wisest of men. Socrates had discovered, as
he had expected, that he knew nothing, but also that the same was true
of everybody else. The oracle meant, in effect, that the wisest of men
was just as unwise as all other men. But we seem to be fundamentalists
about the oracle. There is a curious contradiction in us when we say
that Socrates is an inimitable one in billions because of the power
of his mind, and thus deny the power of his mind to judge truly as to
whether he was an inimitable one in billions. Our minds, which are not
up to the work of imitating him, are nevertheless quite strong enough
to overrule him. Strange.

In old age, Franklin admitted that his
plan for the achievement of moral perfection had not entirely succeeded,
and that he had not, after all, been able perfectly to imitate either
Jesus or Socrates. But he did not say that such imitations would have
been impossible, or excuse himself from them on the grounds that they
would have been impractical or unrealistic, or even, as the modern mind
seems very likely to say, that they would have been counterproductive
and little conducive to success. He says that, all in all, while he
was but an occasional imitator, even so he had thus lived a better and
a happier life than he would have otherwise had. And I do suspect that
Socrates himself might have said much the same, for he, too, was surely
an occasional imitator of Socrates.

The Socrates we have in the dialogues
of Plato simply must be a "perfected" Socrates, a masterpiece
every bit as much artistic as philosophical. I have lived, and so have
you, in this world, which is the very same world in which Socrates lived.
Only its temporary particulars have changed. He did, if only when Plato
wasn't around, or perhaps before Plato was around, worry about money.
He quarreled with his wife, and fell out of patience with his children.
He spoke, and even acted, without considering the full meaning and probable
consequences of his words and deeds. He even, if only once or twice,
saw Reason clearly and completely, and went ahead and listened to Appetite
instead. And once in a while, from time to time, he lost his grip on
that "cheerful and temperate disposition" without which neither
the young nor the old, neither the rich nor the poor, can hope for that
decent and thoughtful life of self-government that is properly called
Happiness. And such outrageous and unconventional charges I can bring--as
can you--against Socrates or anyone, with calm assurance, for Socrates
was just a man. To do such things, as he himself very well knew, was
merely human.

So now I can see before me one of those
persons whom I call, in a very strange manner of speaking, "my"
students. There she sits, as close to the back of the classroom as possible.
She is blowing bubbles with her gum, and not without skill. She intends
to be a schoolteacher. She has read, in their entirety, two books, one
about some very frightening and mysterious happenings in a modest suburban
house on Long Island, and the other about excellence. I now have reason
to hope that she has been reading Emerson,
and she probably has. She is not a shirker, but, at least usually, as
much a person of serious intent as one should be at her age and in her
condition. Her understanding of Emerson is not perfect, but neither
is mine. The essay she has been reading, I have read many times, and
every time with the realization that my understanding of it, up to now,
of course, has not been perfect.

I know this as surely as I know that Socrates
was once exasperated by a yapping dog: Someday, perhaps this day, when
I have explained some difficult proposition's exploration by Emerson,
that young woman, or somebody else very much like her, will raise her
hand and ask the question, and ask it just as Socrates asked,
out of what she knows to be her ignorance, and her desire not to be
ignorant. And her question will remind me that I am ignorant, and that
I didn't know it, and that I do not want to be.

I probably give less thought than I should
to the question of whether the world exists, but I often consider the
question of when it exists. When I am there in class, considering
that young woman's question before me, that is the world. Socrates exists.
As though she were Socrates, this blower of bubbles asks the question.
She has never thought out or named "undefined terms," "unbounded
categories," or "unexamined propositions." She can not
say that a likeness should be noted where only difference was
presumed, or a difference where only a likeness. But she can ask as
though she had considered such things. And in that moment, in the world
that then and there exists, who is the teacher and who the student?
Who is Socrates?

If I have any good sense at all, will
I not give her question as much thoughtful consideration as I
would have given to the same question had it come from Socrates himself?
And for two reasons, both of them splendid?

Rather than effectively dismissing Socrates
when we suppose that we praise him as "one in billions," we
might do better to attend to our words as though we were poets, looking
always deeper into and through them. We could thus also say that Socrates
is one who is truly in billions, the most powerful confirmation
that we have of what is, after all, not merely an individual but a generally
human possibility--the mind's ability to behold and consider itself and
its works. That power is probably unavailable to infants and lunatics,
but, in the absence of some such special impediment, who can be without
it? Can it be that some of us are empty, and without that power which
is the sign of humanity? My bubble-blower certainly is not, and she
is real. I have seen her often. And in that moment when she is Socrates,
I may well be seeing the first moment of thoughtfulness in her life.
Education, real education, and not just the elaborate contraption that
is better understood as "schooling," can be nothing but the
nourishment of such moments.

____________

I imagine some well-informed and largely
wise visitor from another world who comes to Earth to study us. He begins
by choosing two people at random, and, since time and place are of no
importance to him, but only the single fact of humanity, he chooses
Socrates and me, leaving aside for the moment every other human being.
He begins with an understanding of the single but tremendous attribute
that distinguishes us both from all other creatures of Earth. We are
capable of Reason. Capable. We can know ourselves, unlike
the foxes and the oaks, and can know that we know ourselves. He knows
that while we have appetites and urges just like all the other creatures,
we have the astonishing power of seeing them not simply as the necessary
attributes of what we are, but as separate from us in a strange way,
so that we can hold them at arm's length, turning them this way and
that, and make judgment of them, and even put them aside, saying, Yes,
that is "me," in a way, but, when I choose, it is just a thing,
not truly me, but only mine. He sees, in short, what "human"
means in "human beings."

And then he considers the specimens he
has chosen, Socrates and me. He measures that degree to which they conform
to what "human" means in "human beings." With those
superior extraterrestrial powers that imagination grants him, he will
easily discover:

That I have notions, certain "sayings"
in my mind, that flatly contradict one another; believing, for instance,
that I can choose for myself the path of my life while blaming other
people for the difficulty of the path. With Socrates, this is not the
case.

That my mind is full of ideas that are
truly nothing more than words, and that as to the meaning of the words
I have no clear and constant idea, behaving today as though "justice"
were one thing, and tomorrow as though it were another. That, while
wanting to be happy and good, I have no clear ideas by which I might
distinguish, or might even want to distinguish, happiness from
pleasure, and goodness from social acceptability. With Socrates, this
is not the case.

That I usually believe what I believe
not because I have tested and found it coherent and consistent, and
harmonious with evidence, but because it is also believed by the right
people, people like me, and because it pleases me. And that furthermore,
I live and act and speak as though my believing were no different from
my knowing. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I put myself forth as one who can
direct and govern the minds, the inner lives, of others, that, in fact,
I make my living as one who can do that, but that my own actions are
governed, more often than not, by desire or whim. With Socrates, this
is not the case.

That I seem to have a great need for things,
and think myself somehow treated unjustly by an insufficiency of them,
and that this insufficiency, which seems strangely to persist even after
I get hold of the thing whose necessity I have most recently noted,
prevents in me that cheerful and temperate disposition to which I deem
myself entitled. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I seem to know what I want, but that
I have no way of figuring out whether I should want what I want,
and that, indeed, it does not occur to me that I should be able
to figure that out. With Socrates, this is not the case.

And that, in short and in general, my
mind, the thing that most makes us human, is not doing the steering
of this life, but is usually being hustled along on a wild ride by the
disorderly and conflicting commands of whole hosts of notions, appetites,
hopes, and fears. With Socrates, this is not the case.

How could the alien enquirer help concluding
that there is something "wrong" with me, and that the humanness
that is indeed in me has been somehow "broken," which he can
clearly see by comparing me with Socrates? Must he not decide that Socrates
is the normal human, and I the freak, the distortion of human nature?

When he pronounces me the freak, and Socrates
the perfectly ordinary, normal human being, living quite obviously,
as perhaps only an "alien" can see, by the power of that which
most makes a human a human, shall I defend myself by appeal to the principle
of majority rule? Shall I say: Well, after all, Socrates is only one
human being, and all the others are more like me. Would I not prove
myself all the more the freak by my dependence on such a preposterously
irrelevant principle? If that visitor were rude, he might well point
out that my ability to see, on the one hand, what is natural to human
beings, and to claim, on the other, that its absence is only natural,
and thus normal, is just the sort of reasoning that he would expect
of a freak, whose very freakishness is seen in his inability to do what
is simply natural to his species--that is, to make sense.

But Socrates would defend me. He would
say, for this he said very often:

No, my young friend is not truly a freak.
All that I can do, he can do; he just doesn't do it. And if he doesn't
do it, it is because of something else that is natural to human beings,
and just as human as the powers that you rightly find human in me. Before
we awaken, we must sleep, and some of us sleep deeper and longer than
others. It may be, that unless we are awakened by some help from other
human beings, we sleep our lives away, and never come into those powers.
But we can be awakened.

In that respect, my friend is not a freak.
He might better be thought a sleepwalker, moving about in the world,
and getting all sorts of things done, often on time, and sometimes very
effectively indeed. But the very power of routine habit by which he
can do all that has become the only government that he knows. And the
voices of his desires are loud. He is just now not in a condition to
give his full attention to any meaning that might be found in all that
he does, or to consider carefully how to distinguish between the better
and the worse. He might be thought a child, and a perfectly natural
child, who lives still in that curious, glorious haze of youth, when
only desire seems worthy of obedience, and when the mighty fact of the
world that is so very "there" looms immeasurably larger than
the fact of the self that is in that world. He might grow up, and it
is the "mightness" in him that makes him truly human, however
he may look like a freak just now. From time to time, we are all just
such freaks, and mindless, for mindlessness is the great background
of noise out of which some few certain sounds can be brought forth and
harmonized as music.

___________

I am often worried and vexed about the
colossal social institution of "schooling," of which I am
a paid agent. My quarrels and complaint with schooling are beyond my
counting, and also, I must admit, valid but trivial. Looming behind
all of the silly things that we do in schools, and pass off as an "education"
that would have startled Socrates, there is nothing less than a great,
pervading spirit of dullness and tedium, of irksome but necessary labors
directed completely toward the consolidation of the mundane through
the accumulation of the trivial. In school, there is no solemnity, no
reverence, no awe, no wonder. We not only fail to claim, but refuse
to claim, and would be ashamed to claim that our proper business was
with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and that this business can
be conducted not through arousing pleasant feelings, but through working
the mind. Thus it is that education is exceedingly rare in schooling,
and when it breaks out, it is as the result of some happy accident,
an accident that might have befallen a prepared mind, or maybe any mind
at all, just as readily in the streets as in the schools.

Education makes music out of the noise
that fills life. And from the random and incessant background noise
of what we suppose the "mind," meaning really the appetites
and sentiments, education weighs and considers, draws forth and arranges,
unites the distant with the near, the familiar with the strange, and
makes, by Reason, the harmonious music that is Reason. If we
can know anything at all about How to Live, it is in Reason that we
must seek it, for the only other possibility is to seek it outside of
Reason, in the disorder of noise. I am convinced that Socrates is right,
that anyone can make that search and decide, not what the Meaning and
Purpose of Life is, but what the meaning and purpose of the searcher's
life should be, and thus to live better.

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